How does Giovanni's character evolve in "Rappaccini's Daughter"?

The beautiful Giovanni becomes fascinated with the beautiful Beatrice as he watches her from above tend her flowers in the garden next door, alternatively attracted to and repulsed by her. Although warned against it, he meets her—and is surprised when she puts a hand on his arm and warns him away from touching a flower in her garden.

At first he disregards the idea she could have become poisonous as part of an experiment of her father's; he thinks that idea is too fantastic, though he does see that plants and insects seem to die around her.

When Giovanni notices that he himself might be poisonous, such as when he breathes on a spider and it dies, he begins to change.

As worry about what she might have done to him overtakes any concern for Beatrice, Giovanni begins to turn on her hatefully, resenting her and blaming her for her effect on him. He says to her that she has made him “as hateful, as ugly, as loathsome and deadly a creature” as she is. He becomes suspicious of her, thinking she deliberately lured him into the garden to be poisoned so that he would be stuck there, and she would have a companion. His harsh words wound Beatrice, and he becomes unable to see that she is a good person. She keeps telling him that she is pure and virtuous inside, despite her poisonous effect on plants and animals, but Giovanni becomes obsessed with the idea of her being evil and poisonous. At the end of the story, as Beatrice suggests, Giovanni has developed more poison in his personality than she has ever had.

Who is Giovanni in "Rappaccini's Daughter"?

Giovanni Guasconti is the protagonist of Nathaniel Hawthorne's "Rappaccini's Daughter." He is a young student from southern Italy, recently arrived at the University of Padua.

As he is looking out the window of his lodgings, he observes Rappaccini's gardens and sees Beatrice, Rappaccini's daughter. Struck by Beatrice's beauty, he becomes both fascinated by and infatuated with her. Conversing with the University faculty, Giovanni is provided warning about Rappaccini himself: Rappaccini is a poisoner, he is told, single-minded in his pursuit of science, with little appreciation for the value of human life.

As the story continues, Giovanni is shown a secret passageway into Rappaccini's garden, where he begins meeting with Beatrice herself. However, the reality is that Beatrice is poisonous, just like the plants she tends to; and in the course of their encounters, Beatrice's toxic nature begins to infect Giovanni himself, turning him poisonous as well. In this way, Giovanni has himself become another subject of her father's experiments.

As the story approaches its end, Giovanni is given an antidote and returns to the garden, where he accuses Beatrice of purposefully infecting him (with the aim of entrapping him with her). Beatrice defends herself with protestations of innocence, and as the story ends, Giovanni provides her the antidote to drink. In drinking it, Beatrice herself falls dead.

What makes Giovanni sigh in "Rappaccini's Daughter"?

Giovanni sighs in the opening of the story from a mixture of emotions. He is “a young man for the first time out of his sphere,” so he has never been away from home before, and he is homesick. He knows the history, or “the poem,” of his country, and he knows something of the history of the family whose ancient mansion he has taken lodgings in, and he has been reminiscing about what he knows. He remembers that one of the ancestors of the family whose crest is above the door was shown as being in one of the circles of Hell in Dante’s Inferno. He also notes that the family is long extinct. All of this melancholy nostalgia coupled with missing his home leads to his heavy sigh.

Giovanni Guasconti has moved to northern Italy in order to attend classes at the University of Padua, though he is originally from the southern part of the country. It sounds as though he finds the north somewhat dreary in comparison to his home. First, the climate is very different: the sun does not seem to shine as brightly in his eyes. Second, Giovanni clearly misses his home, and this is the first time he has ever really been away. Third, he recollects that a member of the family to whom the armorial crest above the door to his building once belonged was mentioned in Dante's Inferno, adding to the dismal mood of this place. Finally, the narrator describes Giovanni's apartment as "desolate and ill-furnished," unlike his home. Therefore, he has a number of reasons for which to sigh.

What do you know about Giovanni's situation in "Rappaccini's Daughter" that he doesn't?

Giovanni doesn't know that Dr. Rappaccini's beautiful daughter, Beatrice is, quite literally, poisonous. This doesn't mean that she's nasty or unpleasant; it means that she has poison coursing through her veins. In turn, this means that she can contaminate people and other living things by just touching them.

This is precisely what happens to Giovanni, who is initially unaware of Beatrice's unusual condition. One day, while walking in the garden, he reaches out to pluck a blossom for her, but Beatrice immediately seizes his hand and warns him never to touch it. Now that she's touched Giovanni, Beatrice has contaminated him with her poison. From now on, Giovanni will have a similarly negative effect on living creatures as Beatrice herself.

As an expert storyteller, Hawthorne doesn't reveal the nature of Beatrice's condition straight away. He allows us at first to see her as nothing more than a sweet, beautiful young lady. Of course, there are one or two clues that all is not well with her. For one thing, unlike her mad scientist father, she doesn't use gloves when touching what is presumably a poisonous plant in the garden. It also seems more than a little strange that a butterfly should drop dead in mid-flight while flying near to Beatrice's face.

What Hawthorne is doing here is to keep us and Giovanni suitably intrigued so that we'll want to find out what it is about this young lady that makes her so beguiling.